The Blog of Roon

Well, the good news is that the Andragarian invasion is cultural rather than military; more insidious, I grant you, but less shocking. Still, I’m not sorry to have a new stock of pseudonyms.

The bad news? The other shoe regarding Rien’s parentage has dropped in spectacular style. After Dark Eternal working through Rien slaughtered Heartbreaker, someone Renate had wanted rather badly to meet (and could have, if I’d put the pieces together—though Renate thinks it’s just as well she didn’t, as she would only have brought on the poor creature’s death faster) and Will Gerevannin got away clean with another magic rock, the pocket dimension started coming apart at the seams. Cue heroic last-minute escape.

Rather sweetly, Godfrey, Coris, and Coris’s small band of friends had camped out at the dimensional portal waiting for her to come back. (Inter-dimensional travel being what it is, a week had passed in the Silver Coast in the space of a few hours for Renate and company. Read Ursula K. LeGuin’s Changing Planes if you need to know more about this phenomenon. Heck, read it even if you don’t need to. It’s a wonderful, wonderful book.) Renate, however, was in no mood for sweetness; she rounded on Rien and demanded the truth.

She got it. Once she had it, she understood the whole scope of betrayal—from Dark Eternal’s setup to her brother’s sellout to Noble Mercury’s silence on Rien’s origins. Really it all falls into place. Almost no one in her life (excepting candid Aryk, as Matt was at pains to point out to me) has levelled with her; they’ve treated her as patsy or red-headed stepchild rather than colleague. For someone as strongly invested in straightforward honesty as Renate, that’s a bitter pill.

The other thing about Renate? She doesn’t know how to handle anger, she’s so rarely been really angry on her own account. Righteous anger on another’s behalf, battle-anger, these she knows. But just now part of her is screamingly, ragingly angry at the multiple lies, concealments, and treacheries wrought upon her, and she is frankly afraid of her own anger.

So she’s gone into Emilia Eaglebourne mode, trapping herself in her detached, rational, practical cerebellum, walling off the grief and the fury. She had to tell Godfrey what had happened. She did. She had to let her family know she was alive. She did. She had damage control to do. She did it. (I dunno what happened in Cobalt Aerie other than Renate explaining the pocket-dimension mess to Ilium authorities and then politely telling said authorities to take her Troubleshooter badge and shove it good and hard down their lying throats, but I’m sure Alan will fill me in.) She had to tell Talos Clybourne to reach out to Heartbreaker’s remaining followers. She did.

And now she’s back in Kligh Darenton’s manor (she couldn’t go back to her apartment; Rien has its key) with no more immediate work to do and no relief in sight for the heart she has forcibly emptied. It will take some doing, to lure her back to life.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 25th, 2004 at 10:24 pm and is filed under Dragonhunt. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.